That reminds me of that movie, 'Being there' which offered the idea of life being a perceptual experience, it's how you perceive something that colors your response, your emotional stance about it. I can perceive something as a struggle, or an opportunity to learn......

There was a workshop I took years ago where the the facilitator (who incidentally, like Nelson Mandela had been a political prisoner for many years) opened the seminar with the line, "suffering is a linguistic phenomenon, it happens in our languaging." I have thought of that often and find it a profound statement about the choice we have in how we view life.